Ink
by Hinotorihime
Summary: Tolys gets his third tattoo in summer and he gets it sober. Canonverse.


**this is not quite a headcanon** **—it's a possibility, one that I think fits with the way I conceive of the character. it _does_ contain several headcanons, though, most importantly some of my ideas on old prussia and the origin/nature of the infamous Scars.**

* * *

Tolys has a tattoo of a bumblebee on his left ankle, faded yellow and black. It's hidden by his boots most of the time, but sometimes at night he pulls his knee up to his chest so he can rub the tiny stripes with his fingers against the bones of his foot, back and forth and back until he is finally able to get to sleep.

It always feels warm, even in the freezing winter. It's strength, and quiet purpose—it's his sister's voice, soft and tickly against the skin of his ears, telling him about the gods, about Austėja who rules the hives, telling him about the empire to the south who bought their amber and called them Aestii and who Lietuva would get to meet someday, if he was good. It's the warm fire sending chills through his bones as he bent over Prussia's bed trying to soothe the fever while her children cut and burned the ties that bound them to her. It's the white, stony rage when Teutonic Knights stopped answering to that name and carelessly obliterated half a millennium of memories with a single, simple word.

 _(he'd never done a picture before, only outlined woad and ochre in lines and sun-spirals, but his hands were steady despite the drink, despite the tears.)_

The bee is a reminder.

* * *

Tolys has a tattoo of a snake coiling around his right bicep, red and white and gold. He picked it out long before he got it, back when Ivan was still keeping him close, still watching him suspiciously. But if nothing else, in that house, Tolys learned patience. It was years and years before he got his chance: a book run, half-drunk on nerves and nationalism, and he got a warning, and he ducked into the artist's shop because it was a flimsy excuse for sneaking out but it _was_ one, and it wasn't as if Russia had forbidden it. Not yet. And he'd gotten back and when Ivan had searched him the dyes, swollen and inflamed, caught his eye so that he didn't ever find the newspaper tucked into a carefully unstitched seam. And Lithuania had looked his captor (never _master_ , never _lord_ ) in the eye and smiled with all his teeth.

 _(you-don't-own-me made a hot throbbing in his head as he braced himself against the needle. you'll never milk all my venom dry—)_

The snake is a threat.

* * *

 _The Union is far, far different from the Empire but it's the same in every way that counts. Nations' scars are strange things, and you'd think even the others would understand that._

 _(Ivan's never touched him, not like that; blows on the face, shoving and hair-pulling, but never blood on his hands and that damn smile never slips. It's Russia who abuses him, who leaves him shaking from hunger and cold and hopelessness.)_

 _Every packed-full cattle car that pulls away leaves a mark; every mark manifests differently, for people are not the same so Nations are not the same so scars are not the same (equal does not mean the same Raivis screams and tiny pockmark-burns speckle their way across his hands until he can't even write for the pain). For Tolys the trains make an iron bullwhip and write his children's suffering across his back and sides. The lines, he thinks, are shaped like railways: tiny, jagged splinters cut perpendicular across them. They slice through his muscles and make his shoulders stiff; the scar tissue is glaring, blindingly white._

 _When he gets home, he throws out the dusty mirror in his bedroom along with everything else that reminds him of Russia._

 _Even that makes him feel small and tired and **beaten**._

* * *

Tolys gets his third tattoo in summer and he gets it sober, with a handkerchief clenched in his hand in case he needs to bite on it. It takes days, and the nerves are an intricate pattern of dead numbness spaced with hypersensitivity and he wants to scream with every injection.

 _(he's drawn up the design himself and counted the feathers out carefully, a name and a song and a prayer for every loop of the pen, because he hates the scars but they **mean** something, so fixing it has to mean something too…)_

He doesn't look at it until it's completely finished, and then he turns away from the mirror and cranes his neck to look at his own back for the first time in twenty years. Lithuania watches soft white and brilliant gold and feathery black flex and roll over his muscles and he feels light in a way he's almost forgotten.

The wings are a promise.


End file.
